Thursday, November 20, 2014

Window on Eurasia: West has Means Short of War to Stop Putin in Ukraine, Eidman Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, November 20 – Sectoral sanctions
are not enough to stop Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, and no one in
the West wants to fight a war against Russia. But because of the nature of the
Russian elite, including Putin, the West has a means of stopping Putin in his
tracks, a means it has not yet deployed, according to Igor Eidman.

The Russian analyst, who now lives
in Germany, says that “the entire Russian political elite consists of criminals
in terms not only of Russian law but even more that of Western countries.”Thus, he says, “the West could declare them
criminals and seize [their] holdings” and those of their families and advertise
the names.”

“For representatives of the Russian
elite, this would be a real catastrophe,” Eidman continues, something that they
would see as permanently damaging; and they would unite against Putin and his
policies in Ukraine, forcing him to change course or if necessary carryikng him
out of the Kremlin “feet first” (gordonua.com/publications/52013.html).

Taking this step, however, will not
be easy for many in the West although for everyone it should be preferable, the
analyst says.Seizing Russian holdings
abroad, he points out, will lead to a decline in property values in places like
London, and it would violate “the piety” Western countries show to “stolen
private property if the thieves are aliens.”

But any who oppose this idea need to
recognize that “if a war begins, then all this will be seized. Why wait for war
if it is possible to take this step already now? Peace after all is more
important,” Eidman argues.

And the world needs to recognize
that Putin will continue his aggression until he comes up against forces he can’t
overcome.His “new national idea” is
nothing but “the very old idea of ordinary fascism.”His Russia “is still not Nazi Germany,” but
it is very much like “early fascist Italy” or Spain under Franco, a regime
based on nationalist ideology, aggression and xenophobia.

Given the West’s reluctance to stand
up to him in the past, Putin has grown “ever more self-confident and now he has
decided that his time has come.”He is
thus prepared to confront the West with real violence, given that the West has “a
pathological fear of cataclysms” and does not want anything to interfere with
its peaceful life.

Indeed, if “God forbid,” Putin “seizes
Kyiv, the West would react with nothing more than a new round of sanctions,”
fearful that otherwise it would have to go to war. But as Eidman points out,
there are other means to bring pressure on Putin. And some, such as the isolation
of him at the G-20 meeting, have already been employed.

But the West cannot wait to see what
Putin will do next, Eidman says. Putin today “feels himself a superman for whom
everything is permitted. He does not respect his Western partners because he
considers them weaklings to the extent that they follow the rules,” something
he as a Chekist does not consider necessary.

Eidman cites
the words of Lenin about Stalin: “he has concentrated in his hands unlimited
power.’ That is what Putin has done. None of his entourage is able to propose
anything … [And] Putinis proud that what is happening is his personal
initiative.” What he may do next is “impossible to predict” given that he is
someone “with nuclear weapons in his hands.”

In thinking
about him, however, “one must keep in mind that the foreign policy of Russia is
based on those same criminal methods as its domestic policy: lies, force,
intimidation and provocation. Putin is a criminalized Chekist who has fully
accepted the traditions of the criminal world.” And he and his entourage act
like criminals when they deal with anyone else.

But because
they only care about their own personal well-being and because so many of them
have put the results of their theft abroad, the West has a very real chance to
influence some of them by declaring them criminals and seizing their property
and thus making it clear that if they stay with the chief criminal, they will
lose everything.

In the course
of his interview, Eidman makes a number of other observations. Two are
particularly important. On the one hand, he points out, the situation in
southeastern Ukraine is very different from that in Georgia because in the
former case, Moscow manufactured the conflicts on its own rather than
exploiting conflicts that had long existed.

And on the
other, he argues that the pro-Moscow militants in the Donbas are effectively “Russian
jihadists,” that Putin is prepared to use them and then dispose of them, and
that they are not very popular among Russians as a whole, although they do have
a constituency in Moscow among former Chekists and others “raised on
anti-Western demagogy.”